


Is It So Hard to Believe?

by KallanEboi



Series: These are the things that are strange and yet somehow normal [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Dreams, Drugs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-11 23:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KallanEboi/pseuds/KallanEboi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The aftermath of the Baskerville drugs is hard on John. Lestrade and John talk, and Sherlock continues to be surprising.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is It So Hard to Believe?

**Author's Note:**

> Part five of the "These are the things that are strange and yet somehow normal" series. Can be read separately, but it'll make more sense if you read the first four parts.

_It’s dark in the lab and my eyes won’t focus._ My ears are ringing from the noise _and there are dots dancing in front of my eyes._ I’m struggling to see, to take stock of my surroundings, _to try to figure out what’s going on_. And then something cuts through the ringing. Reality’s sliding sideways, and I don’t know why.

_There’s snarling behind me and oh god it’s the hound, the hound that terrified Sherlock on the moor last night. I need to hide need to find shelter need to get away._

I see the empty cages and sprint for one of them, pulling the door closed behind me.

 _I hear a low growl, and my hands shake_ as I pull out my phone, dialing, praying the call goes through. I put a hand over my mouth to muffle my breathing _because I can’t give away my position, I can’t let him (it) (them) know where I am because he (it) (they) will find me and kill me or worse. There’s no answer, but my phone rings almost immediately, loud in the dark, and I try to tell Sherlock that the thing (the people) (the person) (the creature, it’s a creature, oh god it’s huge and red-eyed and glowing and things shouldn’t glow, not like that...)_

The lights come on, blinding me, and Sherlock’s there, saying something about how it’s okay _(no it’s not, it’s not okay, it can’t be okay, there’s a glowing hound out there he saw it didn’t he)_ and then he says we’ve all been drugged.

Wait, what?

I latch onto that, using that discovery to ground myself and rein in my terror. Being drugged explains everything and it doesn’t involve cloning. Or giant glowing dogs with red eyes. Somehow it’s reassuring. I think. I decide to blame my logic for that on the drugs. 

Fear and stimulus, it turns out. A drug that makes nightmares real, or influences nightmares in the waking world. There really isn’t much difference. H.O.U.N.D., an acronym that someone had the bright idea to turn into a real monster.

I do feel a little bad about shooting the dog. I feel worse for Henry, though. I give him the name of the therapist I had been seeing before I met Sherlock, just in case his current one decides that she can’t deal with a patient who once shot at her during the course of one of his episodes.

Somewhere around three in the morning, I realise I’m probably going to be awake all night. Sherlock’s asleep beside me. I’m staring at the ceiling, trying to will myself to sleep, but I’m terrified of what the drugs will do to me while I sleep, what they’ll show me. I want to wake Sherlock and ask him how long the effects of the drugs will linger, but I can’t bring myself to do it for some reason. He’s had just as long of a trip as I have, and I could tell whatever had happened to him in the Hollow, whatever the drug had made him see, had shaken him down to his core.

My phone vibrates quietly, just a single buzz, signalling a text.

Are you awake?--GL

CAN’T SLEEP

Me either. I’m downstairs.--GL

BE DOWN IN A FEW MINUTES

I slide out of bed and pull a jumper on against the chill. I fumble for my socks, but they’re nowhere to be found, so I give up and leave, shutting the door silently behind me.

“Glad I’m not the only one who couldn’t sleep after that madness out there,” Greg says as I come into the front room, the floorboards creaking and cold under my bare feet.

“I’m not sure I want to sleep tonight,” I admit, taking the chair across from Greg. We both stare at the fireplace, the fire long since banked for the night. 

“You’re both mad,” Greg says finally, surprising a chuckle out of me. “Seriously, the pair of you, you’re each as bad as the other. You at least could have told me what was going on.”

“Like Sherlock ever tells anyone what he’s planning,” I reply, going for joking and missing by a mile. I can hear it myself, and Greg catches it.

“Still haven’t broken him of that, huh?” he asks.

“I’ve tried,” I say wearily. “God knows I’ve tried. I’ve been trying for months. I thought...I thought I’d gotten him to trust me after the pool. I just want him to trust me, to trust someone besides himself. He won’t talk to his brother and everyone else he pushes away.”

“He’s been this way for as long as I’ve known him,” Greg replies, his voice kind.

“I just want him to tell me things. I don’t want to change him.”

“You might be the first person I’ve ever heard say that about him,” Greg says. 

I look down at the floor. “I love him, Greg, I do.”

“Wait,” he says, and I listen hard for the judgement in his voice, but there isn’t any. “You two are actually...what? A couple? Boyfriends?”

“We’ve never really nailed that part down,” I reply. “But yes.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Greg says, “Well, that means I owe Mycroft five quid.” I look up at him, surprised. “That’s good, John. Really.”

At breakfast the next day, I realise that one of the few nice gestures Sherlock has done for me in public turned out to be what he had thought was a lab experiment. I feel like I should be angry about it, but I’m too tired to care. And it’s something I really shouldn’t be surprised about, anyway, not from him.

We’re halfway back to London when he suddenly says, “All right, I was wrong about the sugar. Stop gloating.”

“It made just as much sense as anything else we came across on this case,” I reply, fighting back a smile. “So you made a mistake, Sherlock. You’re human.” He mutters something unintelligible and I smile out out of the window, carefully turning away so he can’t see me.

Back at our flat, we both drop our things. I’m really not mad at him about the lab incident. It wasn’t the ideal thing, but I should know by now how he works.

Somewhere in the past twenty-four hours, I’d realised that Sherlock was like a magnet, or the center of a whirlwind. Everything spun around him, creating chaos and order in equal measures. Or rather, he made order out of the chaos by pulling things into his own field of influence. He can walk into a room and pull a coherent story out of the tiniest pieces of information.

“You should sleep,” Sherlock says, startling me, and I realised I’d been staring out of the window at the rain sheeting down outside.

“It’s not even dinner time,” I reply, checking my watch.

“You didn’t sleep last night,” he says.

“How do you know? You were dead to the world.”

“The only mornings you’re ever up before me are the ones where you’ve had a nightmare and slept badly or the ones where you haven’t slept at all. And your nightmares always wake me up, so you didn’t sleep,” he says. “I also heard you and Greg talking last night.”

“He texted me and asked if I was awake,” I reply, turning away from the window. “Wait, we were downstairs, how did you hear us?”

“I followed you to make sure you were all right.”

I stare at him, completely shocked.

“Is it so hard to believe that I would be concerned? We’d been drugged, all of us. And then you shot the dog in the hollow where we were drugged again and then the explosion killed Dr. Frankland,” he says. He stops, inhales, and looks straight at me. “I was worried about you. I wasn’t sure what affects the drugs would have on you in your sleep.”

“I told Greg about us,” I say, looking down at my feet, too tired to process anything else. I file it away to deal with later. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Why would I?” he asks. The lack of derision in his tone surprises me, and I look up. “It doesn’t matter, John. It’s all fine. Now, go to bed.” He strokes my cheek with his thumb before he kisses my forehead. “I’ll be there when you wake up.”


End file.
